tsunami

An acute sense of intuition can be a blessing or a curse. Sometimes a rough, general insight into how life will unfold holds good news; other times one lives in fear and dread of the pain certain to come. But for someone who combines an intuitive grasp of the meaning of unfolding events with a close and dispassionate study of history, the combination of the two can be life's most valuable possession.

Mark Twain said "History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes." I would add that a predictable future blind-sides those who are unaware of precedents, hence unable to gauge the consequences of their own behavior.

People who currently rule here (and I don't mean the government) mistake themselves for the descendants of the republic's founders, a culturally homogeneous, property-owning, liberally-inclined oligarchy which overturned the political authority of the mother country two and a half centuries ago. But the ruling elites we have today are unrelated to the authors of the Constitution, having consolidated and extended their power only during the past 65 years, beginning with their writing the conclusion of the cataclysmic wars and upheavals of 20th-century Europe. They are blissfully unaware of either the brief duration or ephemeral nature of their own rule, and the suddenness with which it will be swept away.

The coming reconfiguration of American society will begin as earlier revolutions have, when a few members of the ruling elites, having read and understood the prophetic writing on the walls, decamp and establish themselves as leaders of the insurrection.

The main features of the regime of capital will also be the causes of its destruction: appropriation of the nation's government and laws by a tiny economic oligarchy, which then uses the usurped power to concentrate all wealth and tax-exempt privilege in its own hands,

Economic factors impelling us toward the coming upheaval include rising levels of poverty, destitution, and homelessness, caused by the deliberate impoverishment of the middle and working classes through widespread unemployment and collapsed real estate prices. Another cause is the crushing burden of debt due to military domination of the national budget, especially in the prosecution of a perpetual, pointless, and increasingly self-destructive series of aggressive and morally repugnant wars, which have no meaning outside the oligarchy's hunger for violence and its predatory obsession with eliminating socially benign spending of any kind, such as Medicare and Social Security.

Despite the effectiveness of the oligarchy's tireless campaign of brainwashing through mass media, primarily television, the millions of ordinary citizens are belatedly awakening to the grim facts of a war waged daily against them, and will sooner or later act accordingly. And actually, the time is not long.